AWARD-WINNING author, activist, and food policy expert, Raj Patel has made the global food system his passion. After working or the World Bank and World Trade Organization, Patel became a harsh critic of their methods and protested against them around the world. His thoughts on food, hunger, and globalization have appeared in a number of US and international news sources including the LA Times, NY Times, and The Guardian.

Patel’s most recent book, The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy, has been praised as a thought-provoking guide to the way economics work, exploring the recent economic collapse and painting a clear picture of how to achieve a fairer, more sustainable economy and society. The Value of Nothing serves as an apt follow-up to his acclaimed book, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System, where Patel not only diagnoses the causes behind our worldwide food crisis, but offers sustainable and feasible solutions to deal with it.

Patel is currently a visiting scholar in the Center for African Studies at the University of California at Berkeley and an honorary research fellow at the School of Development Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. He is also the recipient of an IATP Food and Community Fellowship and is a fellow at the Institute for Food and Development Policy, also known as Food First.

This summer (2012) Patel started work on a new book and documentary, Generation Food, and is traveling around the world to look at how we all will eat in the future. In his travels so far, Patel has discovered that “there is more hope for the future of food than I dared to believe, against impossible odds. And it comes from unlikely places.”